The founding of the National Fascist Party

On the evening of 9 November 1921, in Rome’s Teatro Augusteo, built on the ruins of the Mausoleum of the Emperor Augustus, the delegates of Italian fascism voted to dissolve their existing movement and to found in its place the National Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista, PNF). The resolution followed a speech by Benito Mussolini, a journalist and former socialist who two and a half years earlier had founded a small group of war veterans in Milan and now headed a movement that, by the fascists’ own figures, had more than 300,000 members. The congress, which lasted from 7 to 10 November, was above all meant to end a civil war within fascism itself: since August the local leaders of the action squads had been in open revolt against Mussolini. At the Augusteo a compromise was struck. Mussolini abandoned his policy of reconciliation with the socialists, and the rebel leaders recognised him as their leader – their “duce”. The new party incorporated into its structure the armed squads that for a year had been terrorising northern and central Italy. The result was something Europe had not yet seen: a political party with its own private army. Less than a year later that party carried Mussolini to power.

From the Fasci di combattimento to the Blackshirts

The fascist movement was born on 23 March 1919 in Milan, in a hall on Piazza San Sepolcro. Mussolini gathered there no more than a few dozen men: former members of the assault units (the Arditi), Futurists, revolutionary syndicalists, republicans and – like Mussolini himself – socialists expelled from their party for supporting the war. They called their movement the Fasci italiani di combattimento, the Italian Combat Leagues. The word fascio means a bundle or a league, and the movement’s symbol became the Roman fasces, the bundle of rods with an axe carried by the lictors as a sign of authority. As early as 1915 Mussolini and the left-wing interventionists had been active in the Fasci d’Azione Rivoluzionaria, which campaigned for Italy’s entry into the war.

The fascists’ first programme sounded radical and left-wing. It demanded a republic, votes for women, an eight-hour working day, a steep tax on war profits and workers’ participation in the management of industry. To this was added the fierce nationalism of ex-servicemen who believed that politicians and allies had squandered a victory bought with the deaths of more than 600,000 Italians. The slogan of the “mutilated victory” was coined by the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, and when in September 1919 he seized Fiume, it was he, not Mussolini, who was the veterans’ hero. The fascists resorted to violence from the outset. Their first notorious action was the burning of the offices of the socialist daily Avanti! in Milan on 15 April 1919 – the very paper Mussolini had edited before the war.

In the parliamentary elections of November 1919 the movement suffered a crushing defeat. The fascist list in Milan, on which the Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the conductor Arturo Toscanini stood alongside Mussolini, won a few thousand votes and not a single seat. The most votes went to the Italian Socialist Party, which talked of a revolution on the Russian model, while the new Catholic Italian People’s Party came second. At the end of 1919, according to the historian Emilio Gentile, the entire fascist movement numbered 37 local leagues and some 800 members. Mussolini even considered giving up politics.

He was saved by the “Red Biennium”, as the years 1919–1920 came to be called. A wave of strikes, land occupations by peasants and, in September 1920, the occupation of the factories by the workers of the North terrified the propertied classes, while the state, governed by weak liberal cabinets, behaved towards them like a neutral arbiter. At the second congress in May 1920 Mussolini abandoned republicanism and anticlericalism and presented fascism as the defender of veterans, the middle class and the “productive bourgeoisie” against Bolshevism. The real breakthrough, however, came not in Milan but in the provinces.

The squads of the Po Valley

On 21 November 1920 in Bologna, during the inauguration of the city’s socialist administration, shots were fired, and in the confusion the nationalist councillor Giulio Giordani was killed. From that day an offensive by armed fascist units, the squadre d’azione, swept across Emilia, Romagna, Tuscany and the whole Po Valley. Their members, mostly young veterans and middle-class students, wore the black shirts of the Arditi. They were financed by landowners and industrialists who wanted to smash the red peasant unions and cooperatives. Lorries full of squadristi drove into small towns, set fire to people’s houses, labour exchanges, newspaper offices and party premises, beat up activists, forced castor oil down their throats and compelled socialist mayors to resign. According to one tally, in the first half of 1921 the squads destroyed more than 700 premises of workers’ and peasants’ organisations in the Po Valley alone. Estimates of the number killed in 1921 range from several hundred to over a thousand, including more than two hundred fascists.

For the most part the state looked on and did nothing. Some of the police, carabinieri and army officers sympathised with the fascists and supplied them with weapons. According to official statistics, by 8 May 1921 1,421 socialists but only 396 fascists had been arrested for political clashes. As early as 31 January 1921 the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti warned the Chamber of Deputies that this “little counter-revolution” was preparing civil war. The movement grew at a dizzying pace. According to figures cited by Gentile, it had about 20,000 members in December 1920, nearly 190,000 in May 1921 and more than 200,000 by the summer.

Mussolini had not created this wave. He was merely one member of the movement’s executive committee, and fascism’s real strength lay in the hands of local leaders known, after the Ethiopian chieftains, as ras. Italo Balbo ruled in Ferrara, Dino Grandi in Bologna, Roberto Farinacci in Cremona. Mussolini set the movement’s direction from the columns of his daily, Il Popolo d’Italia, but the squads listened above all to their ras.

Deputies and the Pact of Pacification

In the spring of 1921 Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti, the old master of liberal politics, dissolved parliament and invited the fascists onto the lists of his anti-socialist “National Blocs”. He hoped to bring them into the system and tame them. In the elections of 15 May 1921, held in an atmosphere of violence, some thirty-odd fascists entered the Chamber – 35 according to the most often cited figure – among them Mussolini, elected in Milan and Bologna. Instead of supporting Giolitti, the fascists quickly turned against him, and at the end of June his government fell. The reformist socialist Ivanoe Bonomi became prime minister.

Mussolini then decided that fascism had to change its skin. He wrote that Bolshevism in Italy had already been defeated, and wanted to turn his movement into a normal parliamentary force capable of entering coalitions. At the beginning of August, with the participation of the President of the Chamber, Enrico De Nicola, the fascists signed a Pact of Pacification with the socialists and the socialist trade union confederation. Both sides undertook to cease threats, attacks and reprisals. The communists did not join the agreement, and the Catholics of the People’s Party declined to take part.

For the ras the pact was a betrayal. On 16 August several thousand squadristi from Emilia and Romagna met in Bologna and rejected it. Grandi and Balbo denied that fascism was Mussolini’s creation and attributed its birth to the provincial squads. The slogan “He who has betrayed will betray again” appeared on walls, reminding Mussolini of his break with the socialists. Two days later Mussolini resigned from the executive committee, writing that the defeated must go. The rebel leaders looked for another leader. Grandi and Balbo tried to persuade D’Annunzio, who after being driven out of Fiume during “Bloody Christmas” had settled on Lake Garda, to take over the leadership, but the poet refused. At the end of August the movement’s national council rejected Mussolini’s resignation, but the dispute remained unresolved. In September Grandi and Balbo led thousands of squadristi in a “march on Ravenna”, showing that they too could mobilise crowds without Mussolini. A decision was to come at a congress in Rome.

The congress at the Teatro Augusteo

The third congress of the Fasci di combattimento opened on 7 November 1921 in the Teatro Augusteo, a large concert hall built on top of the Mausoleum of Augustus. A few days earlier, on 4 November, the anniversary of victory, Rome had buried the Unknown Soldier. Now thousands of fascists from all over the country descended on the city. The delegates represented some 2,200 local leagues and, so the organisers claimed, about 310,000–320,000 members. These figures were probably inflated, but no one doubted that fascism had become a mass movement.

Two camps clashed in the hall. Mussolini wanted a party he could control and bring into the parliamentary game. The ras wanted to keep their squads and had no intention of disarming them for the sake of a pact with the socialists. The compromise was sealed on stage. Grandi, who had come as leader of the opposition, publicly embraced Mussolini, and the hall acclaimed him as leader. The price was the abandonment of the Pact of Pacification. On 8 November the congress resolved to dissolve the existing movement, and on the evening of 9 November, after Mussolini’s speech, it voted to found the National Fascist Party. In that speech Mussolini presented fascism as a national movement hostile to both liberalism and socialism, and at the same time – to the surprise of listeners who remembered his anticlerical writings – promised the Catholic Church complete freedom in its ministry. On 10 November an executive committee was elected that included Grandi and other former rebels, and the party’s first secretary became Michele Bianchi, a Calabrian syndicalist and one of the movement’s founders. On 15 November the party’s national council formally renounced the pact with the socialists.

The congress was no peaceful gathering. Rome, a city of railwaymen, clerks and artisans, gave the visitors a hostile reception. There were brawls and shootings. On 9 November, in the working-class district of San Lorenzo, the railwayman Guglielmo Farsetti was killed by fascist bullets. Rome’s workers’ organisations called a general strike that lasted until 13 November, and the squadristi left the city under escort. According to various tallies, between two and five people were killed and more than a hundred wounded in the clashes of the congress days. The fascists did not forget this defeat. When their columns entered Rome again a year later, Tuscan squadristi exacted bloody revenge in San Lorenzo.

A party with its own army

In December 1921 the party published its programme and statutes. The programme proclaimed the primacy of the nation over the individual and over classes, and announced a strong, hierarchical state, a corporative economic order in which employers and workers would cooperate under state supervision, and Italian expansion in the world. The party described itself as a militia in the service of the nation, guided by the principles of “order, discipline, hierarchy”. The statutes made the squads an integral part of the organisation. Until then in Italy, as in other democracies, parties had competed for votes while weapons remained in the hands of the state. The PNF was the first political organisation to combine seats in parliament with a private army openly used to destroy its opponents.

Mussolini left the Augusteo as the undisputed leader, though only half victorious. He had to accept the violence he had wanted to curb, and the rebellion left him with a deep distrust of his own ras. From then on he played a double game. As a deputy he assured liberals and industrialists that fascism was ready for lawful cooperation; as duce he let the squads conquer one province after another. At the beginning of 1922 he founded the monthly Gerarchia (“Hierarchy”), which, edited by his lover Margherita Sarfatti, built up the new party’s ideology: the cult of Rome, of the nation and of the leader.

The long shadow of the Augusteo congress

The party founded on 9 November 1921 won power within eleven months. In 1922 its squads occupied entire cities, and when in August the anti-fascist unions called a general strike, the fascists broke it and seized more town halls. At the end of October Mussolini threatened a March on Rome, and King Victor Emmanuel III, instead of using the army, invited him to form a government. In 1926 the PNF became the only legal party in Italy, and remained so until Mussolini’s fall in July 1943. Today the constitution of the Italian Republic forbids its reconstitution in any form.

The model of the party-militia soon found imitators. In Munich Adolf Hitler, who in the summer of 1921 had taken over the leadership of the NSDAP, gave the party’s strong-arm squads the name of Storm Detachment a few weeks before the Augusteo congress. After the March on Rome Mussolini became Hitler’s teacher, and the word “fascism” came to denote a whole family of European movements, from Spain to Romania, that combined extreme nationalism, the cult of the leader, contempt for democracy and the violence of uniformed squads. The National Fascist Party led Italy for twenty years: to the invasion of Ethiopia, intervention in Spain, the Axis with Berlin, the occupation of Albania and finally the war at Germany’s side, which Italy entered on 10 June 1940. The compromise struck on the stage of the Teatro Augusteo, in which the leader made peace with the squads in exchange for abandoning peace with their opponents, was the first step on that road.